South remembers: Music to Save Europe

Augustin Maurs, Spectral Resistance, 2012, Courtesy of the artist

Music to Save Europe

by Augustin Maurs

Five hundred meters above the Aegean Sea at sunset

There is nothing like an absolute present. No more than an absolute orange or absolute love. But we European geniuses can be rewarded for having edified what resembles the cult of the metronome. And although nothing legible fits into a single, dividable timeframe anymore, we maintain our devotion to a unique and inalterable continuity, in which events obey the predefined rules of synchronised representation.
In order to check out of the hysteria of synchronization, we can imagine a music that deals with different flows and situations, we can move into a ‘relative music’ that requires other kinds of junctions, intervals and behaviours. A music that is not coordinated by given subdivisions inside one flow, but by collisions emerging out of different continuities. These collisions can no longer be seen as divergences, but as an unlimited variety of impulses that we can interpret, replicate or transform.
As a process in time, music is able to comprehend the complexity of a high register of events. Music that evolves outside of the spectre of a single synchronisation is necessarily spatial. It doesn’t need a stage. It is an economy. An economy of impulses. Impulses as units that can be wide, loud, translatable, platonic, narrow, red. Impulses as units that lead to other impulses. But most importantly, impulses as units that can die. An economy of units that can die, that is – music, an economy which indifferently embraces transcendence and transience.
There is nothing like composers, singers, cheese makers and politicians. We all are dealers of impulses, operating as well as imitators or producers; taking part in the same economy as a child blowing in a scuba on a beach or two birds colliding over the Mount Kalamos, 500 meters above the Aegean Sea at sunset – holy cheesiness, which constrains the big metronome, when birds fall and children are bragging…

Anafi, summer 2012

Augustin Maurs, Wind of Anafi, 2012, Courtesy of the artist

Augustin Maurs, Music of the Monolith, 2012, Courtesy of the artist

Augustin Maurs, Child Blowing in a Scuba as a Hymn, 2012, Courtesy of the artist